– I am excited about Romeo and Juliet at SAM Sculpture Park, but we as a society need to stop calling it “the greatest love story ever told.” You know what’s a greater love story? Literally any story that doesn’t end with a 13 year old girl killing herself.*

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Brian dunning’s “pixel stuffing” trick is as old as commissioned web advertising itself. There are a lot of retail websales operations that do exactly the same thing. It isn’t much of a crime until someone with a full time legal staff gets annoyed.

If there is one thing I have learned about capitalism, is that it is rarely honest and the owners of businesses will pull whatever scam they can to make an extra buck. My old boss was telling me that because of the 2007 downturn, we had to have our hours reduced to 32. About two months later, my rent went up, electricity went up, and I had an an emergency repair to do on my car. Meanwhile, that prick was taking orders from customers for cash money and doing the work at his home shop. I only found out about it about a week before I quit after getting three months behind on the rent and being evicted.

“Honest Businessman” is a bullshit concept. You gotta think like a crook to be successful in business.

“Amid calls for him to step down …, McAllister … said he would not seek reelection. After a period of ‘much thought and prayer,’ though, as well as poll numbers showing him leading a potential field in November, the … lawmaker who ran multiple campaign ads last fall trumpeting his faith and family turned an about-face, announcing he’d forge ahead after all.”

It’s obvious what’s going to happen. Technology and conservative labor policies are making humans obsolete, and conservative environmental policies are making the planet uninhabitable for humans. Eventually only machines, computers, and robots will exist on Planet Earth.

I’m not against progress. I’d much rather be sitting here on my fat ass watching my stocks go up and posting on HA than breaking my back threshing and winnowing wheat in some damn farm field. And who wants to plow by hand behind a mule anymore, or do calculations on paper or with a slide rule, or plug wires into a switchboard to connect phone calls?

The trick to making automation work is spreading around the spoils. You can’t have an economy that consists of a few trillionaires who own all the machines that do all the production, with no jobs or income for anyone else. That clearly won’t work. The key is everyone owning a piece of the machines and getting a piece of the output, whether they work or not. I don’t give a fuck whether you call it capitalism for the masses, or socialism, or Sawantism, or communism, or confiscation, or whatever.

What matters is that everyone has to make a living, everyone has to pay rent and eat, and if the economy or society doesn’t provide for them, then they’ll find a way to provide for themselves even if it involves forcible taking. You can have an orderly society or a violently unstable one, but you can’t realistically expect people to voluntarily starve. If you devise an economic model that only meets the needs and wants of some, and leaves others out, then you have to expect those others to revise your model for you. The end result is rarely pretty. Trillionaires, and even mere billionaires, are themselves better off by sharing, and some of them (e.g. Buffet) have already figured that out.

Interestingly, a CNBC survey earlier this year showed that two-thirds of America’s millionaires support higher taxes on the rich and a higher minimum wage.

Actor Robin Williams was found dead in his home this morning. Although a cause of death has not been officially determined, it appears he committed suicide. Williams was known to be suffering from severe depression.

I grew up not far from where Robin Williams grew up. As a teenage theater nerd I was in shows at a little theater where cast members would autograph a small piece of the dressing room on opening night. His was in three places.

One summer home from college that theater had a small fire and I helped hang fesh drywall but we cut out his autograph and built it into a new piece. He and Diane Lane being the two names really needing to be preserved.

Several years later I spent five hous in a room with him in a professional capacity. In between takes we chatted a lot about being from Marin and one of his favorite spots was also one of mine. We both wished we could have one more Zimburger but they tore it down.

I’m going to go watch The World According to Garp. I suspect I will cry. “Terribly sad. I used to be terribly sexy but…but I changed.”

“Every serious study of the political attitudes of voters under 30 has discovered them to be the most pro-government age group since the cohort that directly experienced the Great Depression.

“Young voters are more likely than their elders to believe that government should intervene in the economy to create jobs. They support government aid to education and healthcare more than any other age group.

Meanwhile, that article makes it clear that Florida cops do practice racial profiling:

“Around 2011, Smith noticed a … lot of black clients were getting arrested for jaywalking in Fort Lauderdale. In one case, a guy was charged with walking on the wrong side of the street where there was no sidewalk; it turned out he’d been standing in front of his own house. A 58-year-old woman was stopped for not using a crosswalk on 6th Street, a main corridor through the black part of town. Smith and another investigator went to the location and found that the street was under construction, the crosswalk torn up. It was obvious the police had used a pedestrian violation as a pretext to search the woman for drugs.

“Curious, he asked the police department for a list of all pedestrian violations in the last two years. He then used a yellow highlighter to mark every address that was in a low-income neighborhood. By the time he was done, the list was bathed in fluorescent yellow — 93 percent of the addresses were in poor areas. Most of the stops, Smith noted, had been initiated by narcotics officers.

“He later performed the same exercise with bicycle stops, calling the police department’s records division for a list of the last three years’ worth of violations of a Fort Lauderdale ordinance requiring residents to register their bicycles with the city. Sifting through more than 450 violations, Smith discovered that 85 percent of the people stopped and cited were black men and boys — and that only 2 percent of the stops took place east of Federal Highway, the main dividing line between the city’s affluent sections to the east and the poor parts to the west.”

#9. I agree that hungry people will not willingly self die to spare the feelings of those with jobs. What I don’t see is any serious movement to address the problem. I see it going the other way, and hardening and doubling down of “I got mine, get the hell away from me” attitude. I don’t see any means to peaceful transition into an automated economy. It’s just going escalate into violence and chaos. Any links to people and groups who are looking forward and trying advocate for a better path?

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